


harbour lights

by mysteriesofloves



Series: open wound [1]
Category: Gossip Girl (TV 2007)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Post Series, the state of california should have a character tag in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:42:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29812080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysteriesofloves/pseuds/mysteriesofloves
Summary: And so here is the story: Serena is the face that launched a thousand ships. Dan is tired of being out at sea.
Relationships: Dan Humphrey/Blair Waldorf, Dan Humphrey/Serena van der Woodsen
Series: open wound [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2191446
Comments: 21
Kudos: 41





	harbour lights

**Author's Note:**

> this is really just a relationship study/exploration and hopefully it’s easy to follow. title from slide away by miley cyrus.
> 
> trigger warnings for suicidal ideation, drug/alcohol abuse and miscarriage

His sadness doesn’t make sense in California. There’s nowhere for it to materialize. 

It’s too hot, too dry and blistering. Sadness needs to crystallize, needs to chap and freeze and bite. And it’s all too unfamiliar, too vast to ever not be a stranger. Dan has been telling ghost stories for the last five years. He can’t make sense of sadness in a place he doesn’t know.

It was so much easier in New York, to wallow in it. Maybe that’s why she dragged him across the country — out of the depths and onto the shore, his lifeguard. 

Dan wanted to belong to someone — and who better, than the someone who has already owned some intangible part of him for so long, has never let him stray too far from her lest he lose sight. There are worse fates, he thinks, than belonging to Serena van der Woodsen. 

So here is the story: for five years, Serena was a good girl. _Look at me,_ she was saying. _I can be whatever you want me to be._

And here’s the thing: she couldn’t. Not really. He couldn’t give her a template to work with, couldn’t give her what she needed to fill the empty shell. What he wanted was the one thing she could never be.

(And vice versa. But that is a different story. One much older than this.)

But Serena let him save her. It felt like a compromise, then, to marry her. 

It felt like a compromise, then, when she showed him the house and told him about the job, and pleaded, pleaded, pleaded, to follow the long stretch of light that was the love of his life.

 _It all comes back here,_ a man who’s tinted sunglasses hid his blown out pupils said in the large back booth of a bar on their first night. _When was the last time you were here, sweetheart?_

Serena smiled, that blindingly delighted spark of a smile, scrunching her nose at Dan. _Six years?_

 _Something like that,_ Dan said.

 _You see? That’s just it,_ he said. _All roads lead here. This is the center of the universe._

As ridiculous as it sounded, that’s what it felt like, that first night there, fucking on the beach under the neverending night sky like they were seventeen again, like no one else existed, like it was just them and them and them. All roads lead here: his lifeguard, his lighthouse, the center of his universe.

The house in Montecito is a seashell, it’s ridges all painted white, always quiet except for the sound of the waves, white noise filling each room, and it is not his. It was Cece’s, and now it is Serena’s, and it is not his. They spend that first week with no one else, just them and them and them, fucking in every room inside and out, and when reality catches up after they settle in, it is still not his. 

Serena makes friends fast, because (next to losing them) making friends is what Serena does best. Dan swallows complaints about them the way he’s sure they’re swallowing pills. He has no say in this, should have no say in this, because if they’re a bunch of dumb fucking fools pretending like going on hikes and driving fast down the freeway and walking barefoot in the sand is going to make any of this better, make anything feel like it has a meaning — like life is not just a series of miserable happenstances until you die — then he supposes he fits right in. 

He makes his way to the edge — not at but near — and watches the water take over the rocks below, swallowing them and spitting them back out, each time taking a minuscule part of them with it, grating away fine pieces and claiming them as its own. He knows something about what that feels like.

“What’re you doing?” Serena asks, her hand on his shoulder, and then tangled in his. 

He shrugs. “Just looking.”

 _Don’t jump,_ says the teasing little voice in his head, twisted up in that disarming smile. His thoughts can still sound like her sometimes. No one else has to know. A compromise. 

It’s still the early days. There’s lots of time to fix this. There is nothing but time to fix this.

And here’s the thing: it works.

For the first year, Serena lives amongst stability and is able to blend into it enough that eyes on the outside would never know just how much it is wrecking her to sit still. But she is happy for now, Dan thinks, and if he thinks it, it must be true. Serena is a showgirl, is a sunrise, is a Statue of Liberty. But Dan has seen the curtain call, has seen the eclipse, has known that nothing that tall and inviting can last — the Earth is bound to give out at some point, is bound to bring down the Colossus of Rhodes. It’s a story, she’s a story, and Dan is a storyteller. 

When she’s not at the studio she is on location and when she is not on location she is with Dan. It’s not that he’s keeping track of her (not the way he feels she is keeping track of him), so much as he is overtly aware of her presence. At the end of each day, when it comes down to it — to them and them and only them — he likes having her around. She’s sober, startlingly sober, hardly picks up a drink let alone a bump on the neverending paths of parties she drags him along to, up and down the Hills and the Boulevards and in the desert, sometimes (the worst of them, all open space and dry heat and no place for sadness, just bleakness, which is so much worse). 

Sometimes, Serena’s beauty surprised him. It’s odd, or at least he thinks it should be odd, to look at someone almost every day since you were sixteen and still have their beauty startle you. Serena is never the same twice, and he thinks that must be why. She glitters and she sheds like snakeskin and then she glitters even more.

(Snakeskin makes him think of Blair.)

He finds it hard to think of Serena as his wife; his mouth fumbling around the shape of the word when they meet new people. She’s nomadic by nature, and there’s some kind of guilt that accompanies the shackle on her finger. _I’ll go where you go,_ it says. It sounds more and more like a threat with each passing day. 

For the first year, Dan tries to become anonymous. It’s a funny thing, trying to revert back to who you once were — and just about impossible, he finds. He doesn’t shave, just like the rest of the artfully disheveled masses; he lets his hair grow out, long enough to tie it up, smokes a pack a day, tries coke and hates it, writes a whole bunch of fucking nothing. Six years after the release of _Inside_ and Dan has scrapped two novels, has released a collection of shitty poetry, is trying to not write about California the way everyone writes about California. He doesn’t know what it is yet, this nothing that he’s writing, only that it’s the opposite of a love letter. There are only three things in all of California that he owns — that he can solely see as his, signed and sealed — his new car and his old laptop and his mostly unused typewriter. 

(Mostly unused for things of substance; used only to fill the house with more props, with more noise, clicking away meaningless prose and leaving it around for Serena to stumble upon, to pacify her, to make sure she doesn’t venture past the locked screen of his laptop.)

The car still gives him some semblance of a way out. It’s ridiculous, it’s so fucking stupid, he thinks — riding with the top down, watching Serena’s hair whip wildly, a roman candle in the wind — to ever want something other than this. 

Her laugh is a siren song amongst all the endless blue, the sky and saltwater indistinguishable. Here, inside her, it doesn’t feel like the center of the universe. It feels like the end of the world. And for a moment, Dan can believe he’s happy. 

But this is them: a love letter in a bottle, trapped in a singular moment in time. A snow-filled room on Christmas, a picture frame out of a fairytale. They’re stuck there, always trying to change the ending. 

(Endings make him think of Blair.)

When the phone rings, it’s in the middle of the night. For her, at least, across the coast. For them, it’s still early. The house, of course, is quiet. The ring cuts in like an alarm, an alert, a breach of security. 

It’s a one sided conversation, but it’s easy enough to decipher. A breach of security. A firework display. 

Dan is slate-faced when she tells him. He hardly even shrugs. _You should keep the phone by the bed,_ he says. _She’ll be calling back within the hour to say they’re back together._

Serena says nothing. She slips out the sliding door and shuts it behind her. 

He won’t go running back. That’s what Serena expects him to do, isn’t it? That would be too easy. Too predictable. And isn’t that what this is really about — this house on the beach? To prove something to each other. To prove something to themselves. 

He won’t go back. He won’t even call her. He won’t give in. 

But still, there is a mental bag packed and ready to go. Still, there is one foot out the door.

Serena is always running away, and he is always just running. That’s the thing about them, running away and running back and running to — at some point, it just becomes a circle, and they are destined to run into each other, again and again until they crash and burn for good. They haven’t hit each other hard enough for that yet, he thinks, but it’s there, like the dial on a speedometer, accelerating. 

It’s easier to blame Serena than to blame nothing at all. Sometimes, he even feels bad about it.

***

Their first year ends on the first day of spring (which means nothing here, where there is no winter to emerge from) when she holds the stick up in front of him. It must mean something, have some significance, something of rebirth and roads leading here. 

“You don’t have to keep it if you don’t want to,” he says. 

“Don’t you want to?” 

He can’t bring himself to look anywhere but where her hands sit at her stomach, less cradling and more like she wants to throw up. “It’s not my body.”

“But it’s your life,” she says, and it stings sharp and sweet like a slap to the face.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I want to keep it.”

She nods, teary-eyed and not quite smiling. It doesn’t matter in the long run, because three weeks later, it ceases to exist.

There’s a gift sent across the coast for the kid’s birthday (this is how he thinks of him — _the kid_ — because any concrete terms would mean to think of nature and nurture and all his lost chances) that they both sign the card for, side by side, _With so much love,_ _Aunt Serena and Uncle Dan._

(He’d been seeing some tragic off-Broadway off-beat comedy in a dingy theatre where the show was interrupted every few minutes by the sound of sirens, and he’d come out onto the street during intermission and lit a cigarette and thought about what it meant to become a cliché. When he checked his phone, it blinked back a voicemail.

 _Dan,_ she said, and she must have said it fifteen times before she got anything else out, _my water broke — and I — I don’t know where he is, I don’t know where he is, it hurts — it hurts, Dan, make it stop —_

By the time he got to the house, there was no one there.) 

For the first year, Serena is who she came here to be. And then she’s not. Then, she is just Serena. 

He waits up all night for her, and he calls and calls and he thinks about the headlines and the nighttime special that’ll air in a year about his wife, his wife — he says it on the phone to each of her friends that he calls — _Is my wife with you?_ he says, _have you seen her? Do you know who she’s with?_

It’s daylight when she stumbles back through the door, smelling like stale vomit and the thick musk of pot when she curls around him. He holds her, steady and stable against her shaking. _I can’t breathe, Dan,_ she says, but he isn’t holding that tight. Still, he loosens his grip. _I can’t breathe,_ she says again. 

Serena sleeps the rest of the day. That night, she leans over to kiss his cheek. He puts his book face down and turns to her.

“Did you fuck someone else last night?”

He doesn’t know what answer he wants to hear. He supposes it would be a good enough reason as any to leave.

Serena looks at him a little sadly and says, “No. I love you.”

It’s a good enough reason as any, he supposes, to stay.

He doesn’t know if she leaves or loses the job, and she doesn’t tell him, and he doesn’t ask. What he does know is that Serena is not always there at bedtime, but she is always there for breakfast, and he can’t quite tell which outweighs the other. 

It doesn’t happen suddenly, but because Dan has stopped paying attention to his life again, it seems that way, like one moment there was quiet and the next there was deafening sound — her face on billboards and magazine covers and television talk shows. Serena is writing about California the way everyone writes about California. Her blog gains more and more traction, and just when he was finally getting used to calling her his wife, he stops getting the chance to, because he is the husband. He is her husband, and she needs no introduction. 

_I am a living scrapbook,_ reads a post that Dan clicked on at random while being swallowed in the neverending quiet of the house, _I am a thing that holds pieces of everyone I have ever loved, and sometimes they stop by again to give me another memory to fold into myself, but I am only ever something to look back on._

_I had a best friend, and I needed her like I needed a lung. You can’t love someone like that, you just can’t, because if you lose them, you won’t be able to keep going. And you have to keep going. There’s no other choice but to keep going._

So then this is why he loves her, he thinks, because they’re two sides of the same coin. 

In Laurel Canyon, in a house built just on the edge, a brunette whose name he doesn’t know goes down on Serena, cigarettes and wildfires hanging grey clouds above their heads. _No,_ Dan says, when she — the brunette stranger, her perfume heady and so familiar — reaches for the drawstring of his trunks. _Please, don’t._

 _You like to watch?_ she says, and Dan shakes his head, waves her off. 

_I’m tired,_ he says. _That’s all._

 _What’s it like being married?_ she says later, floating face up in the pool. Serena wanted her to watch them, and Dan went along with it, held Serena by the hips and kept his eyes closed.

 _I don’t know,_ Serena says. 

Later, he holds Serena’s hair back as she vomits into one of the toilets in one of the rooms in the house in Montecito. 

“You need help,” he says, rubbing circles on her back, kissing the bare slope of her shoulder. He feels sunburnt by her. 

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she mumbles.

“You’re not happy,” he says. “We’re not happy.”

“We don’t have to be,” she says. “As long as we’re together.”

She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. When she looks at him, there is no warmth there.

“I know,” she says. “I know why you wouldn’t let her touch you.”

This is them: two sides of the same coin.

And so here is the story: Serena is the face that launched a thousand ships. Dan is tired of being out at sea. When Serena starts to shine again, Dan decides it’s time to step out of the shadows. 

Dan has never believed in Hell, but oh, does the concept make sense now, in the blinding heat on the downtown streets where every crystal-shimmering shopfront reflects back his face. He schedules haircuts; shaves every day, twice, sometimes, to get rid of the itch. He quit smoking but chews his weight in gum. He doesn’t drink anything harder than IPA. 

Dan spends most of the day sitting in traffic to get into the city, and then looking for parking in the city, and then, finally, in the floor-to-ceiling windowed office of his publisher. They hated the last one he gave them and they hate this one. He had cut out the bruised and broken so that he could present a picture of a whole and bleeding heart. But they want what was there before. They want what’s really on the inside. 

So does he. You can’t always get what you want. 

When he steps off the curb, he’s trying to remember where he parked, and he’s avoiding the look in his own eyes staring back at him, and by the time he registers the sound of the horn, it’s too late. 

***

In the dream that’s not a dream, she’s wearing a black dress, and she’s pretending he’s not there. 

_I was wrong about you,_ he hears himself saying. It can’t possibly be him. It sounds too cruel. _I was so wrong about you._

She pretends like she doesn’t hear him, but he sees her shiver. _You really are —_ he’s saying, and he wishes he would stop. But in the dream that’s not a dream, he never does. He wishes just once he’d wake up before he says it. But he never does.

 _You really are a frigid bitch,_ he says. That’s when she turns. _Always have been, always will be._

He must have said it because he wanted her to hit him. She must have known that, because she only walked away.

***

When he wakes up in the hospital, the first thing he thinks to say is:

“Twenty six years in New York City and not a single accident.”

He doesn’t let anyone come from home to see him. It’s minor, really, in the long run. Just a few broken ribs, a few cuts and bruises (cuts and bruises and car accidents make him think of Blair).

“I wish I’d gotten a scar,” he says while the doctor skims over his file. “Then I could make up a bunch of different stories for how I got it.”

The doctor smiles slightly like he’s feigning amusement, like he’s heard this before. Dan doesn’t want to look at Serena.

“That’s what I do,” he says. “I make stuff up. I’m a storyteller.”

He’s discharged two and a half days later. On his first night back at the house, Serena rides him carefully. She cries, and she says: “I thought I’d lost you.”

Dan thinks the right thing to say would be: _I’m here. I’m not going anywhere._

“I’m here,” he says. He wipes her tears away, and it’s the closest they’ve come in months to anything resembling making love.

“Did you do it on purpose?” Serena asks afterwards. 

“What?” he says. She doesn’t repeat the question, so he sits with it for a moment. “No,” he says finally. “I really didn’t see him coming.”

“I don’t think I would forgive you if you did,” she says. Dan tries to think of a joke but comes up empty.

“She did call,” Serena says later, slipping out of bed onto her feet. She said she would sleep in the other room tonight, so she didn’t roll over and hurt him in her sleep. “Right when she heard. She sounded like she was crying.”

Serena rounds the bed and presses a kiss to his forehead. “You don’t have to pretend like you weren’t wondering.”

***

_Listen, son,_ his father says over the phone, calling to tell him that the renters in the loft are moving out at the end of the month. Dan almost laughs at the nerve of him, to try and coax him with that tip-toe of a tone, as if he’s any better at letting things go, as if Lily isn’t laying next to him as he speaks, something they all know but never talk about. They have not and will not go home for the holidays; maybe because there isn’t really a home to go to, maybe because if they go, Serena knows there would be no coming back. _Maybe it’s time to sell._

 _No,_ Dan says. _I’ll keep it._ One foot out the door.

Looking at his life packed up in boxes, ready to move it across the country, was when he should have said goodbye. But if he didn’t exist in that area code, he felt he would cease to exist altogether — and so would everything that happened there. 

Looking at his life packed up in boxes, there was very little to show for it. When she stepped on the threshold, on that last day before the rest of his life, he knew it was the only place that would ever feel like home. 

_Is Serena here?_ she said, so out of place in a house that once hugged her. 

_She’ll be back at three._

When she reached out, he flinched. She placed a hand on the countertop. _You won’t like California_ , she said. _I’ve been. I know you won’t like it._

_I don’t have to._

And because she hadn’t been in this house since when it last hugged her, he had thought of her cradled in his arms, leaning against that countertop, after her body had lost what it had made room for; thought of her bare form perched on it, bent over it, kneeled in front of it. He would not box away those memories, would not carry them with him across the coast. He would, instead, keep them here, where she left them.

 _Well,_ she said, standing before him as a stranger. _I just came to say goodbye._

 _That’s nice of you,_ he said. _To do that this time around._

 _You’re not still hung up on that, are you?_ she said. 

_It was so long ago, Blair, I’m not mad anymore. I don’t even care. I came to terms with the fact that I’d lost you for good a long time ago._

_I don’t know who you are anymore,_ she said, her back to him and heading out the door. _But I do know you’re not happy._

 _I don’t have to be,_ he said, but the room was already empty by then.

***

“You never fuck me anymore,” Serena calls from the kitchen.

“What?” he says. After a moment of no response, he says, “Serena?”

“You never fuck me anymore,” she repeats, slower, appearing between the high arched columns of the kitchen entrance. “Like you used to.”

Dan shrugs. “I get winded just going up the stairs now.”

She stares at him for a beat, then turns on the balls of her bare feet. “Everything’s a joke to you.”

His book meets the floor with a sound loud enough in the ever-quiet house to startle her, to startle them both. And then he’s there, in the kitchen with her, hooking an arm around her waist and lifting her onto the counter. 

_Baby,_ she says. Dan says nothing, just licks the salt from her skin. Serena says, _I want a baby._

***

He calls her once, on a pay phone. He only calls her because he came across a pay phone, in the back of a bar, it’s rusted little keypad a graveyard, cold under his touch. He only calls her because he wants to see if the number is still in service. 

_The people here are so stupid,_ he thinks he’ll say to her, as he presses down on the first digit. _That’s not just a stereotype, it’s true. So fucking stupid it’s hilarious. And vain, God, they’re so vain. A bunch of shallow drunks. You’d hate it here. I hate it here. I don’t really miss you, but sometimes I forget you’re not my best friend anymore. Well, it doesn’t happen much now, not recently. But you’re still the first person I want to tell when something good happens. Well, that doesn’t happen much now. Sometimes you’re still the last thing I think about before I fall asleep. How are you? I hope you’re well._

He checks his watch halfway through the first ring. It’s one in the morning there. Back home, he thinks. He’s about to hang up when —

“Hello?”

The sound of her voice is a defibrillator, waking him up from his Californian coma. 

“I can hear you breathing, Chuck.”

He drops the phone, swinging on its cord, hitting hard against the metal of its box like a cymbal crash. When he puts it back on the receiver, he tastes pennies.

***

His parents weren’t lying when they said they loved each other. He’d doubted that for a long time, but he doesn’t anymore, because he does love Serena. Sometimes, he loves her so much he feels bad about it.

But he knows what it is to be born out of happiness that is destined to be forever liminal. Or, happiness that exists just above the surface. Dan has made enough mistakes already. He will not drown his children in this flooded house on the beach.

***

He finds her asleep on the porch couch, kissing her forehead to wake her. Softly, he says, “I have to go home.”

“Oh,” Serena says, blinking in the morning light. “When do you want to go?”

“No, Serena,” he says. “I have to go home.”

Her face falls flat, emotionless. “You mean you want to leave me.”

“I don’t want to,” he says. “I have to.”

She’s silent for a long moment before she pulls her legs up, recoiling away from him. “I thought it was what you wanted. You used to talk like you wanted one.”

“You think it’ll save us,” he says. He takes a step back, allowing her the space, shielding his eyes from the sun. “I don’t think anything will save us.”

Serena is watching him in a way that makes him hear the next words out of her mouth before she’s even said them. “It’s her, isn’t it? It’s always been her.”

“No,” Dan says. “Not always.”

“But it is now,” she says. “That’s what this is. You’re going back to her.”

“No,” Dan says again. “I’m going back home.”

“She won’t have you,” Serena says. “It’s been two years, Dan. She’s moved on. You know her, if she wanted you she would’ve—“

“That’s not — God, _fuck,_ Serena. You want to know what it is? I hate this fucking house. I hate the fucking beach and I hate pretending like there’s anything about this that works remotely in our favour. You are so fucking miserable, Serena. I make you miserable, don’t you see that? Or are you too drunk to notice?”

“Get out,” she says. “This is my house. Get out.”

“You belong here,” he says. “Go stumble off a fucking cliff.”

Dan takes his car and drives to San Francisco and pretends he’s a Kerouac character, buries his head in the lap of a slam poet who writes about New York but tells him, in the dark, that he’s never really been, buys two moleskins and fills them both up and reads them back sober to find them incomprehensible.

When he drives back to the house, Serena isn’t there, and on the top of the stacks of boxes holding his things sits her thin gold band. He leaves the car in the driveway, because lugging this shit back across the country is hard enough without having to make arrangements for a car he doesn’t even need. He thinks he’ll start taking the subway again, let himself slip back into a comfortable sadness. 

***

His back slides down the door of the loft upon entry, knees giving out at the hollowed out sight of it. He thinks he’s going to vomit, right there on the floor, too exhausted to stumble to the sink or the toilet. He wonders how long it’ll be before the tan fades, before the pale white ghost on his ring finger blends back in with the rest of him.

  
  
  



End file.
